


Blood and Bone

by Glinda



Category: Leverage
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Alternate Universe - Dark, Assassins & Hitmen, F/M, Families of Choice, Implied/Referenced Torture, Team as Family, Unconventional Families, fork in the road
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 19:37:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11766921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Eliot and Parker have always been more alike than either of them are entirely comfortable with.





	Blood and Bone

**Author's Note:**

> In which Archie is killed on a job when Parker is a teenager and Eliot is sent to kill Parker but instead takes her on as his apprentice. 
> 
> A dark little fork in the road that wouldn't leave me alone. 
> 
> I'd apologise for the gratuitious _Star Wars_ and _Ms Marvel_ references, but I'm not actually sorry. (Look, canonically, Parker likes the prequel films, I had to put that information to ~~painful~~ good use.)
> 
> Title and idea, spun off from a strange and atmospheric little song by Kathryn Joseph, 'The Bird', whose hook line is 'bones you have thrown me and blood I have spilled'. Which possibly tells you everything you need to know about this fic.

The second hit job that Eliot takes – the second that isn’t dressed up in fancy words where neither his employers nor Eliot himself are pretending that its anything other than what it is – is on a particularly violent female assassin. The murders are pretty bloody and brutal, but Eliot admires the skill. He thinks it’s a shame to kill someone with so much obvious untrained potential. But the job is to kill her and the money is good. Such are the risks of their line of work, she’ll understand. 

When he meets her, it is utterly, blindingly clear to him that she is not just unschooled in her killing but not remotely a professional. Mostly because she is barely fifteen. 

His current employer had employed her mentor for a job and then, after a dispute about payment – Archie had felt they should be paid for their work, their employer had felt they should die – had brutally murdered her mentor in front of her, kidnapped and tortured her. She in turn had played the scared victim, right up until she was able to steal a knife, at which point she’d killed them all and was slowly, meticulously murdering her way up to the food chain to the man who’d ordered her mentor’s death. At which point he’d hired Eliot to stop her before she got to him. 

Eliot doesn’t have a lot of scruples, but killing kids in cold blood, even possibly psychotic ones, is a line in the sand he isn’t prepared to cross. Especially not one with such entirely understandable motivation. 

~

“I didn’t think you were so soft-hearted,” his erstwhile employer says when they’re face to face once more. “Are you here to kill me for her then?”

“No.” Eliot tells him simply before grabbing him and putting him in a lock he can’t break, and turning him round to face the young girl in question, “I’m here to hold you still for her.”

She smiles beatifically as she raises her rather small knife and the bastard screams rather satisfactorily as she sets to work. He gives her pointers as she goes and she proves to be an excellent pupil. 

~

After that, its not like he can just dump her on social services and walk away. A talent like that needs trained and controlled, unless he wants to be responsible for releasing a serial killer on the general population. Later she’ll tell him some of the fucked up stuff that happened to her in the system and he’ll be relieved he never forced the issue. Instead he takes her on as his apprentice. That’s a role she understands, the only adult who’d never neglected or abused her had wanted that from her and for her, she trusts that. Eliot does his best to live up to the memory of his predecessor – by all accounts a gentleman thief in the best possible way. 

She calls herself Parker and Eliot respects that, never asks her birth name and never goes looking for it. Not even to track down the people who hurt her before and hurt them in turn. If she wants that, she’ll ask for it. 

On the rare occasion that she needs a second name, she uses Spencer and he claims her as his baby sister. It’s an odd kind of family but they make it work. Normal is over-rated anyway. 

(Part of him is sad that Amy never got to meet her, but most of him knows he could never have explained Parker to Amy properly and he’s never liked lying to either of them.)

Mostly they communicate in food. He hones his culinary skills on her decidedly unsophisticated palate and between them they develop a complex language of food and feelings. He never wants their mutual emotional stuntedness to cause her to doubt that she is loved. 

~

She might have been the best thief in the world, he thinks sadly sometimes. She’s a damn good thief and an excellent assassin but sometimes he wonders what she might have been if her mentor had lived. 

~

After Moreau, nothing makes sense. 

He wishes he’d brought her in on that job. He’s glad he didn’t bring her in on that job. (On one side lies the fact she might have stopped him doing something he’ll never be clean of, on the other lies tainting her by association.) He can’t bring himself to face her for weeks afterwards. 

Eventually he arranges a meet up, he cooks her favourite dinner and tries to prepare himself for the fact that she may never let him cook for her again. 

He lays his favourite gun on the table between them and tells her he’s done with guns. That he’s officially hit the bottom and that he can no longer be around them. 

He tells her what he did. To hell with confidentiality causes, this is his sister. If he doesn’t tell her it’ll fester and rot between them. Better to cauterize the wound now and forever. He watches understanding dawn on her, but he keeps on, lest she imagine worse things in his silence than the truth. He watches the horror and revulsion wash across her face until it returns to her usual stillness. He’s oddly relieved, he’s glad that he hasn’t corrupted her entirely, that she still has enough moral fortitude to understand that what he’s done is unequivocally wrong. That he will truly never be clean of this. 

The punch is a relief when it comes. He doesn’t attempt to block it. Or the next one.

Or the next.

He submits to the beating, because he deserves it. He wonders abstractly if she can beat the stain of his actions out of him. 

She hits him until she’s exhausted. 

“I think you might actually let me kill you like this,” she tells him quietly.

With difficulty he shakes his head, he wouldn’t do that to her, “I’m not here to commit suicide by Parker. Like, I said, death would be too easy an option. I deserve to suffer, this just seemed the best place to start.”

She nods in understanding and quietly gathers herself together before she speaks again. He braces for whatever she’s about to say; knowing that it will hurt.

“You were my brother, Eliot,” she tells him, and the past tense twists like a knife in his gut, as she turns on her heel and walks away. 

She takes the gun with her. He’s mostly glad of that. 

~

Its years before they so much as lay eyes on each other again. 

It takes a lot of money to get him to work with anybody these days, but he almost asks if she needed even more of a bonus when she found out he’d be their hitter. 

“Oh goody,” the hacker says, when they snark at each other, “someone thought it’d be a good idea to reunite the murder twins.”

But other than that, it’s surprisingly easy to work together again. 

He wonders if its as obvious to the rest of them, just how broken the pair of them really are these days. 

This team feels too good to last; he hopes it will anyway. 

~

“Eliot didn’t teach me to kill,” she tells Nate angrily, “ he taught me how not to. How to hurt someone without leaving a mark; how to make them suffer by barely touching them. Archie taught me discipline, Eliot taught me control.”

There are a lot of ways in which Eliot deserves Nate’s approbation, but this is not one of them. He may have failed Parker in a lot of ways, but he’d done the best he could by her when she was a kid. Life taught her to kill; he just took her natural talent, and made her the master of it rather than the other way round. They were both pretty broken when they first met, they’d done a pretty decent job of patching each other up as she grew up. She was practically feral when he found her, he refuses to be ashamed of having helped shaped her into someone who could actually function in the world. 

What happened afterwards is another matter, but that’s between the two of them.

~

They’re watching the Star Wars prequels in Hardison’s apartment when it blindsides him. Parker and Hardison are bickering and commentating in asides as they go. He’d never admit it, but he loves this part of their sci-fi marathons the best. Getting to see her be a functioning human, with friends and geeky interests, inside jokes and flirting. It hurts, but it’s a good hurt, watching them falling in love. He thought he’d lost this forever, so he treasures every moment she allows him.

He took her to see the first two sequels in the cinema – wanting her to have the joy he’d had seeing the originals as a kid – but somehow he’d never seen this one. It’s kind of terrible but he’s invested anyway. 

Even through Ewan McGregor’s overwrought delivery he’d recognise that line anywhere. He barely makes it to the bathroom before throwing up. 

He wonders if she’s ever told anyone else that she loved them. If she’ll ever be able to tell them that in the present tense, or have it be a gift and not a weapon.

“Sorry,” she says unrepentantly, watching him dry heave from the doorway. 

He shrugs awkwardly, “it’s not like I don’t deserve it.”

They don’t talk about it. Its part of the unspoken truce they’ve reached that allows them to work together. 

“I wish you didn’t,” she offers, with something like real regret. 

“You and me both, kid,” he tells her. More than he suspects anyone but her will ever know. 

~

“What did you do,” Hardison asks. Eliot can hear the fear in his voice, creeping out from under the anger. Of all of them, he’s the likeliest to get closest to the truth, or at least to what Eliot considers to be the most important part of it. 

“Don’t ask me that,” Eliot replies, begs really, “because if you ask, I’m going to tell you. And the only person I ever told…” 

He trails off, but he doesn’t flinch when Parker meets his eye.

“The only person you told didn’t speak to you again for years,” Nate finishes for him. Eliot nods. He can feel that sink in on Hardison and Sophie, that this is the thing that sundered him and Parker the first time. This is the thing that Parker couldn’t forgive. “Why didn’t you say anything then Parker, why’d you protect him.”

Eliot wants to know that too. He wants and he doesn’t want to know. He’d presumed it was just her way of twisting the knife, leaving him in fear of her revealing the truth. 

She laughs. Not the way she laughs now, but the way she used to laugh. The way he used to think was the only way she could. Now that he knows the difference it hurts like a physical blow. Bitter and broken, a reminder of all the ways he failed her. 

“Because I forgave you, alright?” She tells him, furious and miserable and not meeting his eyes, “that’s why I left, because I knew I would eventually. The only way to stay mad at you was to stay away. The most important thing you taught me was that actions have consequences and you needed consequences desperately. Something worse than prison, something worse than physical pain. Only weapon I had.” 

When she finally meets his gaze he nods to her, letting a little of how impressed and proud he is of her deviousness show. She’d found the perfect punishment for him. She smiles at him, shy and proud of herself. They’ll make a grifter of her yet.

“Alright then,” Nate announces and they’re off, another game is afoot. 

~

Parker forgives him. He thought it would make everything better, but it doesn’t really change anything. He supposes this is what it feels like to walk out of prison, you’ve done your time, but it doesn’t erase the crime you committed. 

None of the rest of the team brings it up again. They take it as read that if Parker forgives him, they’re allowed to do so as well. 

Putting Moreau in a cell is infinitely more satisfying in terms of closure. 

Ultimately Parker had forgiven him because he couldn’t forgive himself. 

He has to keep fighting, keeping working on being a better person, on doing good, because he needs her to be right to forgive him. 

He owes her that much.

~

“Does that make us bad people?” Parker asks him, standing in a crevasse three quarters of the way up a mountain.

Eliot isn’t actually sure of the answer to that any more. He thinks about Hardison and his comics’ quotations. Good, he seems to remember Alec claiming, isn’t something you are, but something you do. Isn’t that fundamentally the choice they’ve all made? Arguably the two of them more than the others. 

“It makes us…us.” He tells her. For the first time in a long time that feels like something they can both live with.


End file.
